Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław, Poland
(Department of Linguistic Semiotics and Communicology)

Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies

Semiotics’ creativity:

unifying diversities, differences, divides

We, as human beings living in a postmodern age dominated by paradigms such as web, net, fast, variety, multiplicity, multiculturality, globalisation, change, are aware that we are not only sign-using individuals but also dynamic sign-makers. Our ability of developing a “semiotic sphere” allows and leads us to perceive the hidden knots relating and unifying phenomena in nature and culture despite diversities, differences and divides.

If difference is “of two kinds as opposed either to identity or resemblance” – according to David Hume –, mainly denoting the quality or condition of being not the same; if diversity is the condition/form or structure of being different as the result of a process of becoming diversified; if divide sets a boundary between systems, interests, opinions within the process of creating varieties in the world of signs, then it is from the multiplicity of these three ds (diversities, differences, divides) that there arises something like the consciousness of the unifying role played by signs, a role which “has endured” through all the fast changes of life experiences and through the changing dimensions of the world. The circumscribing of the three ds within semiotics’ unifying power of creativity reveals the gradual transformation of the horizontality (two-dimensional) of signification into a multiple-layered verticality (constructed on the three-dimensionality of the sign) of an identity signifying act. Such a change makes visible not only the symbolic action of bringing signs into existence/being, but also the web of relations establishing themselves both temporally and spatially (in a palimpsestic way), as far as unifying presupposes an action of discovering, of identifying and of communicating the existence of multiplicity into O/one coherent whole. Thus, communication does no longer mean an encoding-decoding process of interpersonal messages only; it builds and bridges up a complex process of conveying thoughts, of manipulating opinions, of negotiating feelings etc. between different “(semiotic) animals” belonging to various worlds, to (other possible) spaces and times, all of them conceived in terms of imagining, innovating and creating at multiple transmodern levels.A. Participants are kindly asked to submit papers for one of the following areas of interest:

I. Semiotics' creativity: a transdisciplinary bridge between nature and culture1.The creative language of science and technology2. The resonant forms of arts3. The creative power of the W/word(s) in the process of communication4. Towards the unity of religion and philosophy, science(s) and art(s)

II. Creative values of a unifying world, or the “unity within the diversity” of worlds:1. Spiritual and material worlds2. The worlds of imagination and reason3. Virtual and real worlds4. (Re)creating worlds in a “semiotic sphere”

III. Local and global worlds in and out of crisis1. “World wide world” and “small worlds”2. The outside and the inside worlds3. The world of the written, the oral, the pictorial message4. Unveiling new ways of harmonizing worlds